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K2 begins two-phase exploration program at Wels in Yukon

K2 Gold (TSXV: KTO; US-OTC: KTGDF) has begun a $350,000 phase 1 exploration program at its 72-sq.-km Wels gold property in west-central Yukon, 45 km east of Beaver Creek and 185 km south of Dawson City — the start of a two-part program. It’s funding the program through a $1.04 million private placement it closed on June 8, 2018.

K2 started the program in early June. It’s stepping out from the area it previously drilled, known as Saddle, as much as 2 km south to a newly recognized 3-sq.-km area.

This area comprises two zones: Gunpowder and Chai. Both were prospected at the end of the 2017 field season, with the results out after snow had fallen. Samples from Gunpowder graded 28.2 grams gold per tonne, 2 grams gold and 13.6 grams gold. Chai returned 1.9 and 1.67 grams gold.

K2 has finished its geophysical survey and is running LIDAR right now. It will strip Chai and Gunpowder with a back hoe in early August, collect samples and then design a drill program for Chai, Gunpowder and Saddle. Its field season can run as late as October, before poor weather conditions will force it to stop.

“The business model for K2 is to find more Kaminak-style deposits,” K2 president and CEO Stephen Swatton says during a presentation at Destruction Bay, Yukon. We sit inside the Kluane recreation centre: a brown building on the water, named after the Kluane First Nation, who live in the area.

K2 is short for Kaminak 2: a second-coming of the company that discovered the Coffee gold deposit in Yukon’s Tintina gold district.

Goldcorp (TSX: G; NYSE: GG) bought Kaminak in 2016 for $520 million and is currently permitting the project. It contains 46.36 million probable tonnes grading 1.45 grams gold for 2.16 million oz. gold.

A helicopter flies near Kaminak Gold’s Coffee gold project in the Yukon in 2015. More than 50 million years of subduction at converging tectonic plates has created copper-gold deposits across Western Canada. Photo by Matthew Keevil.

At Wels, K2 has only explored 5% of the total property. It says that, as with Coffee, the geochemical footprint of gold crosses all rock types. Chai, for example, contains sandstone whereas Gunpowder, to the northwest, contains gabbro.

The Yukon Geological Survey first sampled soil and till at Wels in 2002 that graded as high as 56.7 parts per billion gold and 33.5 parts per billion gold at the areas later called Saddle and Chai.

Then, in 2011, a private company called Gorilla Minerals optioned and resampled the ground. Infill soil sampling it conducted a year later returned 3,028 parts per billion gold, with rock samples grading as high as 149.5 grams gold.